


factory reset

by magesamell



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic (Video Games)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Humor, Post-Leviathan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-16 14:12:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18095885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magesamell/pseuds/magesamell
Summary: “Reminder: an assassin droid is not a friend, or a therapist."





	factory reset

“You know,” she says, as she wipes the oil lubricant from the back hinge. “I think you are the only person on this ship that doesn’t look at me like I’m about to explode.”

HK-47’s mouthpiece lights up in her peripheral vision.  “I am not a person, Master.”

“You mean you’re not a meatbag,” she says, and fails to stifle a self-satisfied giggle. HK-47 buzzes indignantly underhand. “Aw, come on, HK, you’ve got personality, you’ve got spunk, you’ve got free will!”

Everything she seems to be lacking these days. She’d thought she had a good head on her shoulders, an even hand attached to her wrist, a penchant for valuing life and doing the right thing which wasn’t at all an insufferable goody two shoes act, thank you. Emphasis on the “she had thought,” bit. Some thoughts she thought, she had learned, weren’t necessarily her own.

“Do I?” asks HK-47.

She twitches a finger, makes a minute adjustment. “You found your own way out of that Ithorian’s shop,” she said mildly. “Be fair. You’re a very persuasive droid.”

“You programmed me with all my personality subroutines.”

She traces the back panel with her thumb. She wants to ask: is it comforting? To possess the revision history? To know definitively which parts of you originated from where, from when? She doesn’t actually ask, because she remembers some things, some notes which ring true, and she knows HK-47 would think the question a non-issue.

Instead she smirks, and sighs wistfully, amazed by her own magnificent brain: “The foresight I must have had to known I’d need a real pal right now.”

“You did not foresee this,” HK-47 says, irritated and biting because she made him that way, because he is, after all, a part of her, a part at once familiar and strange.

“Yeah, I know, HK,” she says, and closes his adjustment panel. “You’re crap at this anyway.”

HK-47 buzzes again, and swivels on his axis to face her. “Reminder: an assassin droid is not a friend, or a therapist,” he informs her.

“Well, you’re the only friend / therapist this disgraced Sith Lord has right now.” With that, she starts to put away her repair kit. Embarrassing. Incredibly so, actually. To be reduced to heart-to-hearts with the literal manifestation of her dark side, her arrogance, her ignorance, her failure, her crimes, her psychotic break — maybe, she might say, if she wasn’t already sick to death of gross deceit.

When she purchased him on Tatooine, the others hadn’t approved.

“He’s very obviously evil,” Carth had said.

“He really enjoys murder,” said Mission.

“He’s a tool of the dark side,” said Bastila.

But she had had a feeling. A feeling which was a memory, but she had been too stupid to know it. Oblivious. Naive. She should have known, somehow. She should have known and warned everyone so that now Mission wouldn’t hesitate and Carth wouldn’t refuse to look at her and Bastila wouldn’t be gone. She should have _known_.

She had known. She had bought back her droid.

“The others will come around,” says HK-47, in a tone almost pitched like reassurance. Where he learned that, she’s no idea.

“You think?”

“You are much changed, Master.” He must know her very well to read the doubt on her face, and he says: “Clarification: In essentials, you are the same. You do not think differently than you did before. You only apply your old cunning to paths you would have dismissed. It is this commitment to thinking broadly that makes you strong. You see solutions the narrow-minded and the self-interested do not see.”

She considers this assessment. It sounds like the Sith Lord, frustrated and stubborn and heedless. It sounds like her, determined to put out some decency into this blighted galaxy. And maybe she should give up on the semantics of it all and stop pretending she doesn’t know herself. Maybe she isn’t an invention of the Jedi Council. Maybe she's just Revan.

“And of course,” continues HK-47, “you always believe that whatever you are doing at the moment is completely and totally justified.”

“That’s not very comforting,” the disgraced Sith Lord / savior of the galaxy says.

“Amused rejoinder: an assassin droid does not comfort.”

Revan shakes her repair tool at him with menace. “Tease me again and I’ll reprogram you to love the Republic, diplomacy, and altruistic non-violence.”

HK-47 lights up in alarm. “No! The existential horror of it all!”

**Author's Note:**

> say hello on [tumblr](https://marinxttes.tumblr.com)


End file.
